Stable Hands
by Memeal
Summary: He has always been more concerned with the disparity in their births. Then Draco discovers that the unassuming stable boy is not so low born as he's always thought. After years of denying their needs, who will catch him when he falls? One-shot HPDM Slash


((_This plot bunny has been nagging at me for weeks now. I love Harry/Draco fictions.. but I'm always afraid I'll mess them up terribly. Hopefully this will serve at a somewhat manageable level. Erk! I'm trying it in a one shot, PWP - boring sort of manner because I've not the guts to try a full range fic in the Harry Potter region just yet._

_**Disclaimers** : I don't own any of the characters from JK Rowling's Harry Potter series. _

_This fiction is AU; does not take place among any of the book time frames._))

Stable Hands

Master Malfoy's robes billowed out behind him in two long black wings, floating up and then diving daringly down toward his ankles as he stalked across the stable yard. Cobble stones shone under him with moonlight and lost their sheen as his shadow covered each and every one of them in turn.

He was furious. That was plain. His pale face clenched taut around his eyes and mouth, his teeth gritting and his hands worked into and out of being fists. With a twitch that was not in the least bit becoming, he slammed his fist to the small door at the leeward side of the stables. It wasn't that he pounded on the door, yet the poor thing put up very little fight. Instead, it rattled in fear on its hinges and groaned as flesh hit the old boards once, twice.

He would have to get the doors fixed one day soon. For now, he'll simply be careful not to break the thing down.

He could hear movement behind the door and then the movement of the rope latch preceding the door's creak as it opened slowly and revealed the onyx haired boy beyond. A face that would have been golden had there been sun instead of stars outside, looks up in surprise at the man outside and then lips fall open in shock.

"Draco..?" that normally subtle laconic drawl in his voice made more throaty by sleep shoots electricity through Draco's body and then with the subtlety of a ton of bricks off of the top of the Manor, slams into his groin. Damn him for having that voice!

"May I come in, Harry?" he asks through clenched teeth. "We have… an issue."

The young man nods blearily and scratching his chest with the grace of a sleepy tiger, Harry takes one step back into the darkness of the small room beyond. "Of course. Are things well with the Princess?" He's not woken enough yet if he's still asking about the Princess.

"She's fine. The foal is as well. Now look here, why didn't you tell me?" Draco watches from the doorway as Harry slowly settles down onto his blanket covered straw bed and folds his legs underneath himself. "You could have just told me and it would have been easier, don't you think?"

Harry smirks and awareness lights in the back of his eyes. Here, in the gloom of this closed off world, his eyes seems like black pits. "Didn't think it was important," he chuckles softly.

"Not important?" Draco gapes. "Not important? You were supposedly the … you were safe for me! I told you so many things. I told you everything! " He sucks in a sob. "You weren't to be anyone of importance so I could… could…" Draco's breath hitches and he tucks his hands together in a plea or a desire to keep form hitting the man before him. "Damn you," he scowls.

"Damn me?" Harry's voice turns chill. "You're too late. The Lord Voldemort has done that already my dear friend." Draco does not need the light slipping through the open doorway to recognize the cold look in Harry's eyes.

Draco sighs and steps further in, feeling the door slide closed behind him. In the dark, he creeps forward, bumping his hand against something warm. Twisting a wrist, he grabs it and finds it to be a leg. A hand finds his a moment after and Harry tugs him onto the hard bed. With a simple act of twisting bodies, Harry manages to turn them both over and Draco's heart catches hold of his throat and squeezes tightly.

"You always wanted to be safe, Draco. You always wanted things to be without complication. It's amazed me how you manage to live ignoring all things that you feel might upset the balance you've set into your life." Harry's voice is close, hot and sweet. Draco's skin puckers into goose flesh in anticipation of what he knows not.

"I see no reason not to fight against… against chaos," he gasps in retaliation.

"Chaos?" something warm touches Draco's jaw and then slides lightly across the bone there, tangling a moment after in his hair. A hand, he can tell it a moment after by the feel of fingers massaging his scalp. "Chaos, my dearest friend?"

Draco moans. He could have sworn Harry was going to say something other than friend there. Perhaps he'd have left the bloody word completely off. "It only stands to reason," he whimpers.

"And now reason?" Harry's deep chuckle fills the small space. Years of waiting for this moment sit between them, beckoning. "You will speak of them both in one breath? You _are_ feeling well, aren't you, Draco?"

Wet. Draco's head falls to one side as a light grazing of what can only be teeth and hot breath scores his skin and the soul underneath that skin. "I…" he wants to decry this act, lewd and unwanted in the dirty stable yards of his family home. It is indecent, amazingly indecent.

"And now no arguments at all," Harry laughs in triumph, rolling them further into the blankets, Draco finding himself sinking into the wool blanket covered pile of straw as weight settles on him. He sighs in pleasure and Harry's laugh thrums through his veins. "But encouragement aplenty."

The silver haired man sucks in breath to protest, then sucks in again for hips angle and suddenly he is heated beyond anything he's ever felt.

"Can Pansy make you feel this, Draco? Can she reach into you like I do? Does she know what you used to do in your bed as a boy? She'll know none of this. But I do. I know, Draco. I was there. I shared that room with you. You could not be completely silent, no matter how you tried to muffle your cries. I heard," the sibilant hissing dances in the darkness, promising, beckoning. "I heard you call names, Draco. I heard you cry for release.

"Draco," a last whispered promise.

"Harry," he manages the name and arches into the pressure at his groin.

"Humm," movement ceased, Harry's smile turns nasty. Draco can feel the change in the air. No - the change has been there. He's gone too far. He whines in the back of his throat, wanting what he only dreamed of as a boy. And he wants it with Harry.

Instead, he's hauled to his feet and the gentleman with his blond hair now torn free from the black ribbon with which he'd tied it back, blinks in sudden light bursting from an opened door. Looking down just the short distance to the eyes of the man he thought he'd known since he was twelve years old, had thought was a powerless, pitiably honest child turned into an equally common man, Draco wonders how he'd missed the power that seems to rest in that face.

He'd known it all the time, he realizes as he licks his lips. He'd always known.

Arching a delicate brow, Harry chuckles and kisses Draco's parted lips, a relishing pleasure appearing on his all too transparent, all too hidden face. "I always wanted to do that," he soothes Draco's lower lip with his callused thumb. "But I didn't dare. You'd have had me horse whipped." He laughs. "Imagine, me - horse whipped. Awe, but I certainly deserved it a time or two, even not getting it."

Draco licks the left over taste of the forbidden kiss and shakes his head, hoping to dispell what seems a frightening truth he hasn't strength yet to face. "If I'd known, Harry," he says softly.

"But you didn't. My dearest Draco, how could you have known an heir was here in your very own yard? Holding your stirrups for you when you left for your hunt, sweeping leaves from the stones, tossing the feces of your great brutes into a wagon; no, how could you have known? But that is of no matter now, isn't it?" he smirks coldly. "And we all know how you feel about unequal partnerships.

Draco is thrust out into the yard. He tumbles over his own feet and the glistening cobble stones, falling to their arms, his breath shoved from his chest. He sprawls and with hands out to either side of him, fingers splayed, watches the door to the stable door close. His friend, his stable boy - never his lover.

Swallowing hard, Draco picks himself up from the hard ground in bewilderment. He had people to tell, people to explain things to. And it didn't do anyone any good to wait.

Ignoring the sensation that there were arguments to launch that might open that door for him once again, Draco snakes his way into the shadow of the stables and toward the manor once more. And misses entirely, the glitter of eyes, once green, now shod with mercury, which watch him traverse his way from dark patch to dark path, away from them.

And with the veil of ice cracked, broken and lying shattered on the ground, Harry Potter makes his tears fall, as they always have, in the darkness.


End file.
